REVISED AND UPDATED—If you enjoy automotive history, here’s the best 9 minutes and 32 seconds you’ll spend today: with this great video biography of Ettore Bugatti. 

As fine as it is, this film biography of Ettore Bugatti is a little less than perfect. A few dates are scrambled. Ettore’s father Carlo Bugatti (1856-1940), a designer of breathtaking objects from jewelry to furniture and Italy’s leading proponent of Stile Floreale, as Art Nouveau was often called there, is dismissed as a woodcarver. Ettore’s younger brother Rembrandt (1884-1916), a renowned sculptor of people and animals, is given short shrift as well. Still, there’s plenty of great substance packed into this nine minutes on the life of Bugatti, including seldom-seen still photographs and archival film footage.

Born in Milan in 1881, Bugatti founded his car company, Automobiles E. Bugatti, in 1909 in Molsheim, a town of the Alsace region. At first their parents assumed that Ettore would become an artist, Rembrandt the engineer, but their destinies were reversed. As it was, the cars of Bugatti were often triumphs of art over science. Their engineering may have been eccentric at times, even mistaken some might say, but their beauty was never in question. Enjoy the video.